Yesterday’s post was about a truly remarkable cookbook, The Noma Guide to Fermentation. Today I’ll talk about a kind of high-temperature enzymatic reaction, the making of black garlic and other blackened goodies. Properly speaking this is a Maillard reaction and not a fermentation, but let’s not quibble when the result is so delicious.

These products need to be made at a temperature of 140-150 degrees. This is hard to achieve without a specially built chamber, although I notice with interest that a household appliance built especially to make black garlic is available on Amazon. A rice cooker on “keep warm” is suggested, but mine turns off automatically. I am trying my large crockpot on the ‘keep warm” setting and the lid cracked to keep the temperature lower. But the process takes weeks, so I also bought some finished black garlic ready to use. If you go in for this cheat, you have the option to get the Asian kind that is one single huge clove of garlic about an inch across as shown above, but if you buy from Black Garlic North America you can buy it peeled fairly economically or (my choice) you can buy 1.5 pounds unpeeled and have the skins available to put in simmering chicken stock, giving it wonderful depth. It is also sold in tiny little packets in many grocery stores, but I do not recommend that form. It is often dried out and unpleasant by the time you get it when it should be moist, chewy, and have the complexity of good balsamic vinegar with a different flavor.
As for using it, one of my favorite simple uses is to pound two huge single cloves or 5 to 6 regular cloves of black garlic to a smooth paste in a mortar and pestle with a little salt, then pound in 2 tablespoons of cold butter and a teaspoon of very good balsamic vinegar (nothing from the grocery store.) Pound until you have a smooth mousse-like paste, then use it to top steaks, spread it on bread, or toss with a little pasta. To make the heavenly sauce above is only slightly more complex. Make the black garlic butter paste as described. After pan-grilling a nice bit of steak, while the steak is resting deglaze the pan with water or red wine, boil down the fluid hard, add a cube of beef glacé from the freezer, and when the glacé is melted, add the black garlic paste and stir in thoroughly. Add a little water to thin the sauce to desired consistency, taste for salt, slice the steak, and pour the sauce over the slices. This amount of black garlic paste makes enough for two people. The recipe is very adaptable and doubles easily. It’s rich and meaty, full of umami, and enhances everything it touches. Tart it up with some extra butter if you want it even richer. It also does wonderful things for ordinary supermarket cremini mushrooms, and even better things for more flavorful mushrooms like shitakes. Needless to say, make beef glacé if you don’t have it, and don’t even think about using a boullion cube. Or pound out the garlic cloves without adding the other ingredients and put them in vinaigrette.

Above, several regular-sized cloves of black garlic were pounded and roughly mixed into half a cup of red wine vinaigrette and spooned over cold sliced steak, sliced avocado, and salad. This might sound like too much but the flavor of black garlic is mellow and surprisingly low-key and you need a lot when it’s the main flavoring.

I was rather startled to find that all kinds of miraculous health benefits are attributed to black garlic, to the extent that it is sold in capsules for people who want to take it more conveniently. That anything as meaty and delicious as black garlic should be ground up and put in capsules is weird to me, sort of like taking steak in capsules, but suit yourself.

Incidentally if you grow a lot of garlic and have trouble storing it through the winter, it might be worth rigging up a chamber so that you can make black garlic in quantity. I would imagine that it could be sold quite profitably at farmers markets, since I almost never see it in those venues. However, I am nowhere near handy enough to tell you how to make a 140 degree chamber without burning down your house. Know your limitations.

‘The ”other goodies” refers to the fact that the same process can be used to blacken some other foods, with varying results. Please use the Noma people as your guide if you want to try this, since I am experimenting with it but my products are not ready yet. Their descriptions of apples blackened in the fermentation chamber, then dehydrated until chewy, then coated in very dark chocolate, sound luscious. I am blackening some quinces, and I’ll report back if the result is worthwhile.

I like carrots in general, and this year I’m especially enamoured of the carrot variety named Deep Purple. As you see above, it is not a wimpy purple-blushed orange carrot. It is a startling deep indigo-violet right to the core. It is packed with anthocyanins, which can only do us good, and the flavor is a bit less sweet than many modern hybrids, which suits my preferences. I like carrots, not candy bars.

If you are accustomed to boiling carrots you will need to rethink your strategy, because the rich anthocyanin content in this one makes it bleed on the plate like boiled beets. This is not attractive, and I am no fan of boiled vegetables anyway, so a cooking method that keeps its juices inside where they belong makes sense.

I am cooking a lot of carrot steaks lately and this is a great method for quick vegetable accompaniments that requires no forethought. The prep is quick. Catch your carrots, scrub them thoroughly, cut off the tops and bottoms, and cut the body of the carrot lengthwise into “steaks” of the thickness that you prefer. I like 1/4″ because I like them to cook quickly and get a little cooked clear to the center. I cook all the odd-shaped side slices because they are all delicious; the tapering parts get a little gooey and caramelized, which adds depth and savor. I salt the slices lightly, rub them with good olive oil, and add any seasoning that I might want. In the case shown here they were to accompany blackened fish chunks and so I dusted them lightly with blackening spices.

After you cook your entree, or in a separate nonstick skillet, heat the pan over medium-high heat and lay in the carrot slices, not letting them touch each other. Let them cook at a brisk sizzle until the underside looks cooked and is deep brown in spots, flip, and repeat. Serve and eat.

Incidentally, when I say “nonstick skillet,” these days I mean seasoned cast iron. The newer ceramic-lined nonstick skillets might be safer than the older ones, but their nonstick qualities rapidly break down if used over high heat and they are not considered safe for use under these circumstances. I also dislike the mushy not-really-a-crust that is produced over lower heat, and only fairly high heat will produce a true sear. So cast iron it is. Keeping a skillet seasoned takes a little extra work but not much. The Maillard browning reaction is the cook’s friend for deepening flavor and it happens happily in hot cast iron. The meaty tang that browning produces makes carrot steaks an ideal vegetable entree.

The same general method can be applied to purple carrot quarters as shown in the steaming plateful above. In this case I cooked them over lower heat for a longer time with no seasonings but salt and olive oil, and added thyme butter just before serving.

Grilling is another great way to cook purple carrots. The ones shown above are a purple-blushed variety that I grew before I discovered Deep Purple, seasoned with garlic and ginger midway through grilling so that the garlic doesn’t burn and topped with chopped turmeric leaves to accompany a dish of southeast Asian grilled shrimp.